Giorgia Meloni appoints minister who once wore Nazi armband

Giorgia Meloni has appointed an MP who wore a Nazi armband to his stag party to her Cabinet.

Galeazzo Bignami, a Brothers of Italy politician, has been named undersecretary of Italy's infrastructure ministry.

The 47-year-old lawyer from Bologna said he felt “profound shame” over the 2005 fancy dress photograph that first emerged back in 2016, adding that Nazism was “the absolute evil”.

Marco Furfaro, a Democratic Party MP, tweeted: “Shame on you Giorgia Meloni,” calling Mr. Bignami’s appointment “an indecency against the constitution, history, memory and victims of that swastika."

Ms Meloni has repeatedly tried to distance herself from her party’s fascist roots, but has promoted a number of MPs with controversial pasts.

Claudio Durigon, named undersecretary at the labour ministry, once proposed renaming a park in the town of Latina after the brother of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator.

Critics on the Left, including the Italian National Association of Partisans, warned that the appointments were yet another troubling sign that the current Right-wing government was turning a blind eye to fascist sympathisers within its ranks.

On Sunday, hundreds of nostalgists gathered for a rally at the crypt of Mussolini in the Emilia-Romagna town of Predappio. Dozens were pictured publicly giving the stiff-armed fascist salute, a gesture that is forbidden by law and can result in fines.

The authorities were criticised for failing to clamp down on those breaking the law at the rally while taking a heavy-handed approach to stop an illegal Hallowe'en rave called “Witchtek”, which had drawn several thousand young people from throughout Europe to an abandoned farm building near Modena.

The new far-Right government then moved quickly to draft a new anti-rave law prohibiting large rallies without proper permit.